Myanmar Arts & Crafts

Today there is a tremendous diversity in the subjects that are carved. There are Buddha images, altars and other religious figures, nats or spirits; elephant, oxen, buffalo, tiger, bullock cart and peacocks as souvenirs for tourists; chinthes and other objects of Myanmar legends. Orders can be placed for almost any model, at very reasonable prices.

Wood is cheaper - in Myanmar- and softer than other materials but can be difficult to handle. Carvers carefully select wood with the right degree of hardness, grain and hue for each object. Myanmar carvers prefer to work with rosewood, ironwood, teak, tamalan (Dalbergia oliveri), hpaw (Adina cordifolia) and yamanay (Gmelina arborea).

Lacquer ware is perhaps the most distinctive and traditional of all Myanmar Burma handicrafts

and the most widely produced and used. Lacquer ware was long a favorite of royalty for storing documents and precious jewelries.
  
Common households employed Lacquer ware for everyday use such as keeping betel nuts and leaves or as soup bowls.
Monks use a black lacquer ware bowl
 
known as thabeik when asking for alms. Lacquer ware - Lackarbeiten - from Myanmar Burma Birma was so highly treasured that Myanmar’s kings often presented lacquer objects as gifts to foreign emissaries.

Little is known of how the making of lacquer ware - Lackarbeiten -started in Myanmar Burma Birma, although some believe that it may have been introduced from China’s Yunnan province. What is certain is that lacquer ware is a traditional Myanmar craft that dates as far back as the 13th century.

Valued for its artistic beauty and practical qualities — it is light and watertight, for example — lacquer ware has many applications. One can find lacquer ware ash trays, bowls, water jars, vases, salvers for temple offerings, cups, jewellery boxes based on an ancient design that double as pillows, traditional betel boxes, plates, storage chests, tables and chairs.

Considering the time and work involved — it takes five to seven months to make even the smallest item — lacquer ware is surprisingly inexpensive. Lacquer ware makes a wonderful memento of a visit to Myanmar.

The centre of lacquer ware manufacture is Bagan in upper Myanmar. It is a cottage industry and in the village of Myinkaba alone, some 600 households produce lacquer ware. Visitors are welcome to watch the process, a skill passed down from generation to generation. Golden Cuckoo Lacquer ware in Myinkaba and Ma Moe Moe Family Lacquer ware in Ywar Thit Quarter, New Bagan, have English-speaking proprietors who are willing to demonstrate the processes step by step.

The process begins with the making of a bamboo frame for the lacquer ware item, a bowl for example. For objects of the highest quality, fine horsehair, taken from the tail, is woven around the frame. You can tell if horsehair is used by pressing the sides of the bowl together — they should touch. Lower quality bowls are made completely of bamboo wicker woven around the frame and are very stiff as a result.

Bamboo wicker or horsehair are traditional materials employed for lacquer- ware products. Nowadays, cheaper and more durable wood — mainly teak or mango....

Crafts, woodcarving, marionettes, gold, silver, iron, bronze, brass  casting, copper casting, tapestry, relief, stucco, turnery, drawing, painting, lacquer ware; sculpting, stone, marble, lapidary work, lacquer ware, tapestries, wood carving, sandal wood, textile, mother of pearl, tribal, paintings, silver ware, jade ware, antiques and reproduction, Ivory, pearls, marble carvings, gem painting, puppets, other souvenir items, souvenirs.

1884 and the arts and crafts movement: the Arts and Crafts movement was shaped by a range of radical developments in politics and belief, Alan Powers examines their significance during the year in which the Art Workers Guild was founded, showing how the movement was intimately linked to the time of its origins, Apollo, by Alan Powers

The chief reason for selecting 1884 as a significant year in the Arts and Crafts movement is that on 18 January, two pre-existing discussion groups, the St George's Art Society and the Fifteen, met at the Charing Cross Hotel to merge as the Art Workers Guild (Fig. 1). The Guild linked survivors of the Pre-Raphaelite generation, among them William Morris and the painter John Brett, both of whom served as masters during the 1890s, to a younger generation of architects, painters, sculptors and other practitioners, with a commitment to breaking down the barriers between the fine and decorative arts. (1) The founding members covered a wide stylistic range.

Since it is arguable that the concerns represented by the Art Workers Guild were well recognised at least ten years earlier, does the date of its foundation have any special significance? (2) The early 1880s were an extraordinary moment of change in British economics, politics and belief, something recognised by Winston Churchill as the end of the epoch of middle-class liberal domination. (3) The seeds of Empire established by Disraeli began rapidly to sprout. G.M. Young, writing in the 1930s, saw the election of 1880 as 'the last effort of liberal, detached England ... to save itself from the complications and costs of world empire.' (4) For those who lived through the period, such knowledge would have been taken for granted. As Raymond Williams wrote in 1958, 'The temper which the adjective Victorian is useful to describe is virtually finished in the 1880s; the new men who appear in that decade, and who have left their mark, are recognisably different in tone. To the young Englishmen in the 1920s, this break was the emergence of the modern spirit'. (5) More recently, David Cannadine has recognised the significance of 1884 in terms of the posthumous publication in that year of Arnold Toynbee's lectures The Industrial Revolution, for the book's introduction of 'the catastrophic interpretation' of the whole of the industrial period as a time leading to 'a rapid alienation of classes and to the degradation of a large body of producers', which became the commonly received interpretation until challenged in the 1920s by a revision of economic history. (6) What follows shows the synchronicity of ideas and events around the year 1884, from which some conclusions are drawn.

Politics impacted on daily life owing partly to generational and structural changes in the main parties, revealed in the election of 1880 that returned Gladstone as Prime Minister of a Liberal government from which Joseph Chamberlain led a breakaway faction with his 'Unofficial Programme'. Instability was increased by economic depression. Wages fell continuously from 1879, without any reverse until 1886. The word 'unemployment' entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1882 in recognition of a new condition. Frederick Engels related the sudden rise of Socialism directly to the ending of English monopoly in the world market. (7) In London, the suffering caused by laisser-faire economics among the casual labour force of the East End finally struck home as a national scandal through publications such as The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, a pamphlet by two Congregational ministers of October 1883. 'The Discovery of the East End', as it has been called, became a theme throughout the decade, culminating in the 'Bloody Sunday' demonstration of 13 November 1887 and the dock strike of 1889. (8) One victim of the downturn of the early 1880s was Christopher Dresser's Art Furnisher's Alliance at 157 New Bond Street, which failed with heavy debts in 1883, indicating symbolically that it was time for a different design look. It was against this background that the Art Workers Guild was founded, in a decade that came closer to revolution than any between the 1840s and the 1930s.

Writing on 'Socialism in England in 1884', in the 9 August number of the magazine Justice, the weekly publication of the Social Democratic Federation, William Morris declared that 'Some three years ago anyone who had predicted the new birth of Socialism in England would have been looked upon as a dreamer, if not crazy.' (9) He considered it an awakening after a thirty-year slumber dating from the dispersal of the Chartist uprising in 1848. The Social Democratic Federation was the name given in 1884 to the Democratic Federation formed in 1881, with H.M. Hyndman as its driving force. Morris joined in 1883 and became the treasurer in the same year, at a time described by E.P. Thompson as modern Socialism's 'point of emergence from the advanced radicalism of the previous decade.' (10)

1884 was Morris's fiftieth year and a time of personal transformation. His energy in lecturing during the year was phenomenal, and specific examples of its influence are recorded. On 26 January, for example, he addressed the Leicester Secular Society on 'Art and Socialism', being met at the station by his host, Sydney Gimson, and his nineteen-yea-old brother Ernest, then articled to a local architect. After the lecture, they stayed up late, since Morris 'saw something of the possibilities' in Ernest, and later gave him an introduction to J.D. Sedding in London, for whom he went to work. (11) In November, Morris was in Glasgow, where a future socialist, John Bruce Glasier, was in the audience. Morris appeared 'in his ever-afterwards familiar dark-blue serge jacket and lighter blue cotton shirt and collar, (without scarf or tie) and with the grandest head I had ever seen on the shoulders of a man ... A kind of glow seemed to be about him, such as we see lighting up the faces in a room when a beautiful child comes in.' (12)
At the end of 1884, the SDF split, owing to Hyndman's divisive activities and attachment to imperalist patriotism, leaving Morris, who saw clearly the linkage between imperialism overseas and oppression at home, as the principal figure in the Socialist League. The events in Egypt and the Sudan in 1884 helped to clarify his position, as he wrote in 'The Bondholders' Battue' in Justice on 9 February: 'Let not Englishmen then, whatever may have been the fate of noble General Gordon, be deluded by a cry for vengeance, or an appeal to what, in this case at least, is a spurious patriotism. The workers have many accounts to settle nearer home, without allowing a Liberal government to promote reaction under the pretence of putting down slave-dealing, or to annex Egypt for the benefit of the upper and middle classes.' (13)

Morris's journalism for the year covers the range of issues associated with the whole lifespan of the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as some more topical and individual. 'Cotton and Clay' on 26 January explains why the artificial bulking of cloth through heavy sizing is injurious to the worker and to the buyer. The uncontrolled expansion of cities, similarly commercially-driven, is questioned in 'Why Not?' on 12 April, connecting the health and use of land with the issues of art and economy. In 'The Housing of the Poor' (19 July), Octavia Hill's doubts about the value of the Royal Commission on this theme are commended, although Morris goes further than the limits of her philanthropic vision to prefigure something closer to the early work of the London County Council housing architects. 'Individualism at the Royal Academy' (24 May) condemns the stupidity of the current art market and its products, while three articles on 'Work in a Factory as it might be' are a valuable corrective to the common mistake of thinking that Morris was against factories and the use of machinery. If machines could be used to produce worthwhile goods, the benefit would be a shortening of working hours, and the availability of the time saved to increase job satisfaction through creative input. In November, the theme of the Lord Mayor's Show summoned the image of John Ball to make a link between the fourteenth century 'fighting against the fleecing of the people by that particular form of fleecing then in fashion, viz.: serfdom or villeinage', implying that contemporary life had its equivalents. (15)

One focus of agitation was the American Henry George, advocate of the Single Tax, based on the value of land, and whose book Progress and Poverty was published in England in 1880. He conducted lecture tours in England before returning to stand unsuccessfully as mayor of New York. In April 1884, a farewell banquet to Henry George was organised by the Rev. Stewart Headlam, the founder of the Christian Socialist Guild of St Matthew, in which he declared private property in land to be in ethical opposition both to the Ten Commandments and to the teaching and life of Jesus Christ. (16) Building on the foundations laid in the 1860s by F.D. Maurice, Headlam launched his 'Priest's Political Programme' in 1884, and held regular meetings in Trafalgar Square. In terms of ecclesiastical politics, Headlam brought an existing high-church sacramental tendency in the Church of England into the political arena, proclaiming the need for beauty, the opening of museums, art galleries and libraries on Sundays, and the blasphemy of using the text 'the poor ye have always with you' as an excuse for leaving social problems unsolved. (17) Headlam was the most flamboyant figure of the movement, whose house at 31 Upper Bedford Place was furnished by the founder of the Century Guild, A.H. Mackmurdo. In 1895, Headlam agreed to the request from Selwyn Image, a fellow member of the Anti-Puritan League, to stand bail for Oscar Wilde (whom he scarcely knew), returning to meet him on his release from Pentonville two years later.

As Sheila Rowbotham and Jeffrey Weeks have written of this period, 'As yet there was still no clear division between Marxists who sought to change the external forms of social relationships in the SDF and those who were more preoccupied with inner spiritual transformation.' (18) Many thinkers were drawn to find alternatives outside the stark choice between a mechanistic worldview and the Church, which failed to answer their social or spritual concerns. Edward Carpenter called it 'a fascinating and enthusiastic period--preparatory ... to even greater developments in the twentieth century. The Socialist and Anarchist propaganda, the Feminist and Suffragist upheaval, the huge Trade-union growth, the Theosophic movement, the new currents in the Theatrical, Musical and Artistic worlds, the torrent even of change in the Religious world--all constituted so many streams and headwaters converging, as it were, to a great river.' (19)

The militant atheist Annie Besant (Fig. 5) was introduced to socialism by Eleanor Marx's husband, Edward Aveling, in 1884 and was especially active in organising the match girls' strike at Bryant and May, east London, in 1888. In that year, she acknowledged 'there was some hidden thing, some hidden power' that it was her destiny to find, through the medium of Theosophy, which she had first encountered in 1882. (20) In 1884, the Theosophical Society went through a split, the breakaway group being led by the golden-haired and charismatic Anna Bonus Kingsford (Fig. 6), whose lectures and book The Perfect Way, 1882, promoted an esoteric understanding of Christianity. Kingsford, who died in 1888 aged forty one, had trained as a doctor in Paris and was an advocate of women's suffrage and a militant vegetarian and anti-vivisectionist.' (21)

Mrs Besant, separated from her clergyman husband, was famous first as an advocate of birth control, for which she was tried in 1877. The agenda of sexual liberation interwove with other themes in the writings of Edward Carpenter, whose major poem in the manner of Walt Whitman, Towards Democracy, was published in 1883, a year after he had used a legacy to buy land and a cottage near Sheffield, where he later lived in an open homosexual relationship that gave inspiration to C.R. Ashbee and later to E.M. Forster. Maker of sandals and a moderate follower of the simple life, Carpenter threw a stone into the pond at Walden in memory of Henry Thoreau during a visit in 1884. He was also a major advocate of women's freedom and rights.

At this time, Carpenter supported the Social Democratic Federation and the Fellowship of the New Life, the association largely founded by a younger man, Havelock Ellis, in the later part of 1883, which split during 1884, the breakaway group, under George Bernard Shaw, becoming the germ of the Fabian Society. (22) Ellis's moment of epiphany had taken place when he was a young man in Australia to whom 'the universe seemed to many only a factory with a deafening whirl of machinery through which those who desired to find in it a home wandered disconsolately'. As a result of reading Life in Nature by James Hinton (1862) he was able to see 'that beyond the apparent gap between religion and science there was a basic unity and harmony to life.' (24) Shaw and Ellis were only in their late twenties at this time, and both made significant contributions to spreading knowledge and understanding of new possibilities of economic life and gender equality. Ellis's collection of essays The New Spirit, 1890, is a catalogue of romantic inspirations of the previous decade, including Whitman, Tolstoy and Ibsen, whose play A Doll's House, translated (as Nora) by Frances Lord in 1882, was introduced to Ellis by his new friend, the novelist and campaigner Olive Schreiner, in March 1884. (25)

The Art Workers Guild, which did not include women members until the 1960s, seems to have stood apart from the rise of feminism and the 'New Woman' in the 1880s, although it encouraged the setting up of a Women's Guild of Arts in 1907. The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded by many of the existing Guild members in 1888, did admit women members from the beginning, however. (26)

Closer in its ideals to the Arts and Crafts, and less extreme in its challenge to the existing order, was the Settlement Movement, whose birth also formally occurred in 1884, when Toynbee Hall was opened in December. The clearest single point of origin was Thomas Hill Green, Fellow of Balliol College, famous for removing the sense of guilt from young undergraduates, who died aged forty-six in 1882. Green expounded a version of Hegel's philosophy that was sufficiently adapted to form a creed of action even for the non-philosophical, in which the potential of the state to create a coherent society was a central belief. He established firmly the notion that it is proper for the state to take positive action on behelf of its citizens. (27) Green's tutelage of Arnold Toynbee, who died only a year later, was fictionalised in the relationship between 'Professor Grey' and Robert Elsmere in Mrs Humphrey Ward's novel Robert Elsmere, published to wide acclaim in 1888. Unable because of his religious doubts to join the church, Elsmere goes (as Toynbee himself had done) to the East End to conduct social work.

Why was Toynbee so important? Alfred Milner, one of his contemporaries, wrote, 'no man has ever had for me the same fascination, or made me realise as he did the secret of prophetic power--the kind of influence exercised in all ages by the men of religion and moral inspiration.' (28) Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel was established in his memory by Canon Samuel Barnett as the first 'Settlement House', rather than as a college mission. Balliol was the largest single source of its residents in the early years, and from Toynbee Hall one can trace the research and principles on which the post-1945 Welfare State was founded, particularly since William Beveridge was a member of the settlement. The Toynbee Hall building, by the architect Elijah Hoole, is not itself representative of the Arts and Crafts movement, although Henrietta Barnett, the wife of Samuel and later the moving force behind the establishment of Hampstead Garden Suburb, used strong and rich colours in the public rooms (Fig. 7). (29) From here, C.R. Ashbee (a member of the Art Workers Guild from 1897) launched his Guild of Handicraft in the East End, the most substantial interaction between the Arts and Crafts, Carpenter's ideas about fellowship and the social mission of Green to break down class barriers.

The most significant of the settlement buildings architecturally, however, was the University Settlement founded by Mary (Mrs Humphrey) Ward herself, and built in Tavistock Place, Bloomsbury to the designs of Smith & Brewer (both members of the Settlement and of the Art Workers Guild) in 1898 (Fig. 9). (30) Here, T.H. Green's influence was commemorated in his repeated monogram in the library, neatly affirming the intertwining of influences from fifteen years before.
It is clear that some valid connections can be made through individuals between the Arts Workers Guild, the broader Arts and Crafts movement, and the various movements of thought outlined above. Is there significance in the choice of the name 'Guild', which was also adopted by the Christian Socialists in the form of 'Guild Socialism', the two movements being linked in the person of the architect A.J. Penty? Does the evidence of synchronicity and incidents of crossover between these groups amount to a solution to what the cartoonist J.P. Stafford depicted in 1886 as 'The Earthly Paradox' of William Morris (Fig. 3), in his dual attachment both to art and to socialism? Could we become so engaged in the mind of Carpenter or Havelock Ellis as to accept as axiomatic that the inner life and the outer world can be made permeable to each other, as the esoteric thinkers revived in the 1880s had always taught? Do the 1880s stand as a period between the Aesthetic Movement and the Decadents, when art for art's sake was seen as a retreat from reality?

The Settlement movement changed its aims during the 1890s as conditions improved and the state took a greater role in social work. It is arguable that the energy that the Arts and Crafts movement was highly specific in its timing, as a result of the feeling generated in the 1880s, which for a number of reasons was not sustained at such a high pitch.

The broader picture of the 1880s helps us to understand that the real product of the Arts and Crafts movement may not have been physical objects, but education. This was one of T.H. Green's major lessons, which he carried out in his own life not only as an Oxford don, but also in his engagement with the school examination system. Ashbee's enterprise in Whitechapel was both a School and a Guild, while members of the Art Workers Guild, W.R. Lethaby above all, took control of the LCC art and technical schools as soon as they came into being in the early 1890s and replaced the existing 'South Kensington' curriculum, with its tedious and uncreative graded exercises, by the principle of 'learning by doing.' University extension lectures, often about Ruskin, organised from Oxford after 1885 by Michael Sadler, who attended Toynbee and Ruskin's lectures and later translated Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art, were attended by up to 500 students in northern industrial towns.

The 1880s was the time when it still seemed possible to work towards an Earthly Paradise in the cities, as Toynbee Hall demonstrated. The Art Workers Guild, situated in the area of the Inns of Court, represented this commitment as well as a practical choice. By the end of the century, Fabian politics, which drove municipal reform, had moved away from any inherent belief in the relevance of art to social progress. The LCC's preference for 'cottage' estates after 1900, and the launch of the Garden City Movement in the same years indicated a loss of confidence in the possibility of mending the cities. Ashbee's words for the 'Chorus of Demons' in the Art Workers Guild Masque, Beauty's Awakening, performed at the City of London Guildhall in 1899 (Fig. 10), show his disillusion with the LCC and the condition of London, which the Masque in its symbolic way was meant to improve. (31) His decision to uproot the Guild of Handicraft and take it to Chipping Campden in 1902 is equally symbolic of lost hope. A last-ditch attempt to recover the unity of art, craft and politics was made through the Fabian Arts Group and the Junior Art Workers Guild in 1907, when Alfred Orage, a protege of Carpenter and editor of the New Age, tried to convert the Fabians to art, while Eric Gill and Penty attempted to convert the Arts and Crafts movement to a more radical politics. Both attempts failed, and Gill resigned from the Art Workers Guild, became a Catholic, and left Hammersmith for Ditchling. (32)
Academics continuing ancient prejudices against cranks may still prefer not to engage with figures such as Carpenter or Anna Kingsford, but in other respects the 'New Life' of the 1880s has been retrospectively validated by the 'New Age' of the late twentieth century in the recognition of the damage caused by a mechanistic world view coupled to religious literalism. The conviction that art can be practical, socially useful, non-ironic and non-egotistical has always been represented among practitioners of craft and design, and still underlies the principles on which members of the Art Workers Guild are elected.

'Art is Unity' is the motto of the Art Workers Guild, and may be taken as a relatively simple expression of different forms of art coming together. It may also owe something to Ralph Waldo Emerson's invocation of the unity of the seen and unseen, or perhaps it illustrates T.H. Green's belief in a Hegelian unity of conflicts and sects. As Sheila Rowbotham writes, 'Carpenter found a dialectical philosophical basis for his politics in the mild Hegelian idealism which influenced English thinkers in the late nineteenth century. He shared their stress on personal action and the longing for harmony and unity, their desire to transcend the world as it was with the world as they thought it should be ... he thought matter gained meaning only when it had consciousness projected upon it.' (33)

(1) See H.J.L.J. Masse, The Art Workers Guild, Oxford, 1935, and Peter Stansky, Redesigning the World: William Morris, the 1880s, and the Arts and Crafts, Princeton N J, 1985; also Alan Crawford, 'The Importance of the City' in Karen Livingstone and Linda Parry (eds.), International Arts and Crafts, exh. cat., Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2005. Unlike the Century Guild or the Guild of Handicraft, the Art Workers Guild was a membership organisation without any intention of production or, as it decided early on, of organising regular exhibitions of its members' work. It continues in existence at 6 Queen Square, WC1. See www.artworkersguild.org

(2) Peter Stansky covers this briefly in Stansky, op. cit., p.123.

(3) Winston Spencer Churchill, Lord Randolph Churchill, 1906, vol. I, pp. 268-69.

(4) G.M. Young, Portrait of an Age, 2nd edition, Oxford, 1953, p. 129.

(5) Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950, Harmondsworth, 1961, p. 165.

(6) See Arnold Toynbee, The Industrial Revolution, London, 1884, p. 84; David Cannadine, 'The present and the past in the English Industrial Revolution', Past and Present, vol. CIII, 1984, pp. 131 42. For a valuable general survey of the decade, see Helen Merrell Lynd, England in the Eighteen-Eighties, Oxford, 1945.

(7) Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1956, p. 422.

(8) See Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London, Oxford, 1971, p. 150: 'Between 1880 and 1900, the agricultural depression, the rural exodus, the growing predominance of urban England, the increase of working class discontent, fears about foreign competition and doubts about free trade were all inter-connected'.
(9) 'Socialism in England in 1884' in Nicholas Salmon (ed.), William Morris, Political Writings, Contributions to Justice and Commonweal, 1883-1890, Bristol, 1994, p. 54.

(10) Thompson, op. cit., p. 297.

(11) Sydney Gimson, Random Recollections of the Leicester Secular Society, Part 1, 1932, p. 22. Leicestershire Records Office, quoted in Mary Comino, Gimson and the Bamsleys, London, 1980, p.15.

(12) John Glasier, William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement, quoted in Laurence Thompson, The Enthusiasts, London, 1971, p. 36.

(13) Justice, vol. I, no. 4, 9 February 1884, p. 4, in Salmon, op. cit., p. (13.) In an interview of 9 January in the Pall Mall Gazette, General Gordon described how he could resolve the crisis of the Mahdi's rebellion in the Sudan. This generated a popular fervour, and within ten days Gordon had been despatched to Khartoum, where he was besieged. The rescue expedition, under Sir Garnet Wolseley, set out in September, arriving on 28 January 1885, two days after Gordon's violent death at the hands of the Mahdi's supporters.

(14) The different views of housing provision are described in Stedman Jones, op. cit. The Housing Act of 1885 that arose from the Royal Commission failed to make the transition to permitting public funding of housing, which was not enacted until 1890, under pressure from the newly formed London County Council.


(15) William Morris, 'The Lord Mayor's Show', in Justice, vol. I, no. 44, 15 November 1884, p. 2. Morris published A Dream of John Ball in Commonweal, the successor monthly paper to Justice, in installments during 1886. The closing passage of Morris's book is the end point of Humphrey Jennings's Pandaemonium, the coming of the machine as seen by contemporary observers, London, 1984 (the material was assembled by Jennings prior to his death in 1951), which begins with Paradise Lost.

(16) Peter d'A. Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival 1877-1914: Religion, Class and Social Conscience in Late-Victorian England, Princeton NJ, 1968, p. 116.

(17) The Rev W.E. Moll of St Philip's. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, wrote in 1885, 'Surely the poverty is bad enough: but to fix it upon the Father of us all is possible only to men whose god is gold.' Church Reformer, 15 June 1885, pp 121-22.

(18) Sheila Rowbotham and Jeffrey Weeks, Socialism and the New Life: The Personal and Sexual Polities of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, London, 1977, p. 42. I am grateful to Alan Crawford for bringing this book to my attention.

(19) Edward Carpenter, My Days and Dreams, London, 1916, p. 245.

(20) Annie Besant, An Autobiography, London, 1893, p. 309. The importance of occult movements in the 1880s was recognised by Samuel Hynes in The Edwardian Turn of Mind, Princeton, NJ, 1968.

(21) See the valuable account in Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, Chicago and London, 2004.

(22) The Fellowship of the New Life was originally conceived by the self educated philosopher Thomas Davidson. It published a periodical, Seedtime, in the later 1880s.
23) Havelock Ellis, Introduction' to James Hinton, Life in Nature, London, 1932, p. xi.

(24) Rowbotham and Weeks. op. cit. p. 144.

(25) Yaffa Claire Draznin (ed.), My other Self: The Letters of Olive Schreiner and Havelock Ellis, 1884-1920, New York, 1992, p. 39.

(26) See Anthea Callen, Women and the Arts and Crafts Movement, London, 1980.

(27) Merrell Lynd, op. cit., p. 176, summarises Green's teaching as follows: '(1) that material reality was not all of reality; (2) that freedom and authority are not necessarily antithetical and that certain kinds of authority may enhance freedom; (3) that certain activities of the State are desirable for the sake of positive individual freedom'.

(28) Alfred Milner, 'Reminiscence', in Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century in England, New edition, London, 1908, p. 21.

(29) See Standish Meacham, Toynbee Hall and Social Reform, 1880-1914, New Haven and London, 1987. Raymond Unwin, who with Barry Parker was the chief designer for Hampstead Garden Suburb, was a disciple of Edward Carpenter.


(30) The building was initially called the Passmore Edwards Settlement after the principal funder, and is now known as Mary Ward House. See Adrian Forty, 'The Mary Ward Settlement', Architects' Journal, vol. CXC, 2 August 1989, pp. 28-49.

(31) The verses are printed in the special number of The Studio, summer 1899, devoted to Beauty's Awakening, pp. 25-29. In performance, they were omitted as being too controversial.

(32) See Alan Powers, 'Writers and Thinkers: A.R. Orage' in Crafts, no. 127, March-April 1994, pp. 18-19. Orage's often-quoted condemnation of the Arts and Crafts movement's decline into 'a lamentable series of little guilds' needs to be understood in its context as a call for the recovery of a political and social mission.

(33) Rewbotham and Weeks, op. cit., p. 104.

Alan Powers is reader in architecture and cultural history at the University of Greenwich and honorary archivist of the Art Workers Guild. He wrote the essay on architecture and gardens in Britain in the catalogue of the V&A's 'International Arts and Crafts' exhibition.

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